Newly Released

By Amy Virshup

Published: May 18, 2006

The spring publishing season is in full swing, and the book industry is converging on Washington for the annual Book Expo America. On store shelves, recently published titles range from books about baseball and horse racing to a novel told in the alternating voices of twin sisters whose lives are truly inseparable.

Clemente

The Passion and Grace of Baseball's Last Hero

By David Maraniss
Illustrated. 401 pages. Simon & Schuster. $26.

By the time Roberto Clemente's DC-7 crashed on New Year's Eve 1972, this Puerto Rico-born right fielder (No. 21 for the Pittsburgh Pirates) had amassed exactly 3,000 hits, played in two World Series and developed a reputation as one of baseball's most selfless players. (The plane was carrying relief supplies to Nicaragua, which had been hit by an earthquake.) Almost 35 years after his death 2 hospitals, 40 public schools and more than 200 parks and baseball fields in the United States are named after him. Mr. Maraniss, a Pulitzer Prize winner whose previous subjects have included Vince Lombardi, Bill Clinton and Al Gore, turns to Clemente's story, in which ''memory and myth are entwined.''

Black Maestro

The Epic Life of an American Legend

By Joe Drape
Illustrated. 280 pages. William Morrow. $24.95.

Thirteen of the 15 riders in the first Kentucky Derby were African-American, while black jockeys won 15 of the Derby's first 28 runnings and have won none since. In ''Black Maestro,'' Joe Drape, a sportswriter for The New York Times, tells the story of the last black rider to win the horse racing classic: Jimmy Winkfield, who won back-to-back derbies in 1901 and 1902. When he lost the race in 1903, his career in the United States was over, but in many ways his adventure was just beginning. He ended up riding for the czar in Russia, running a horse farm in France and finally fleeing the Nazis to rebuild his career as a trainer in the United States.

Shirin Ebadi, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2003 for her human rights activism, was a judge in the Iranian Ministry of Justice when the Islamic Revolution overthrew the shah in 1979. She had enthusiastically joined the masses of people who had climbed to the roofs of their Tehran homes to shout, ''Allaho akbar'' (''God is greatest'') into the night to support the mullahs. But, Ms. Ebadi, writes in this memoir, ''it took scarcely a month for me to realize that, in fact, I had willingly and enthusiastically participated in my own demise.'' She adds, ''I was a woman, and this revolution's victory demanded my defeat.'' After being demoted to a clerk in her own court, Ms. Ebadi eventually became a lawyer for her country's dissidents, and was threatened and jailed for her work. She tells her story with the American writer Azadeh Moaveni, author of ''Lipstick Jihad.''

The Girls

By Lori Lansens
345 pages. Little, Brown. $23.95.

In this, her second work of fiction, Lori Lansens tells the story of Rose and Ruby Darlen, conjoined twins attached at the head: ''Raise your right hand. Press the base of your palm to the lobe of your right ear. Cover your ear and fan out your fingers -- that's where my sister and I are affixed.'' The book takes the form of competing memoirs, told in the two women's voices. Abandoned by their mother, they've been raised by the nurse who attended their birth in a small town, Leaford, Ontario. Publishers Weekly, in an advance review, noted that Ms. Lansens ''captures a contradictory longing for independence and togetherness that transcends the book's enormous conceit.''

Oracle Bones

A Journey Between China's Past and Present

By Peter Hessler
491 pages. HarperCollins. $26.95.

In this follow-up to his 2001 bestseller, ''River Town,'' Peter Hessler has moved on from Fuling, in China's Sichuan province, where he spent two years teaching English as a Peace Corps volunteer. Working variously as a ''clipper'' of news articles in the Beijing bureau of The Wall Street Journal, as a freelance writer and as a correspondent for The New Yorker (which the Chinese Foreign Ministry insists on translating as ''New York Person''), Mr. Hessler weaves together a history of China's intellectual and archaeological past, with portraits of its fast-changing present. He visits places like Shenzhen, the ''Overnight City,'' where, as Mr. Hessler writes, ''the average resident was less than 29 years old; there were few elderly people.'' He adds, ''Shenzhen University didn't have a history department; students could major in golf management instead.''

Desperate Networks

By Bill Carter
404 pages. Doubleday. $26.95.

In his third book about the television industry, Bill Carter, who covers the networks for The New York Times, chronicles the creation of the 2004-5 TV season. As the book begins, he writes, ''the old network structure of prime-time lineups designed to amass enormous numbers of viewers all at the same time was everywhere under attack.'' The networks' news divisions were losing their Big Three (Brokaw, Rather and Jennings), and TiVo, downloads and the rise of reality TV were eating into their prime-time franchise. Here Mr. Carter tracks the decisions that saw ABC's fortunes rise, NBC's plummet and Simon Cowell's star continue to rise on Fox. Much of the result was determined, he writes, ''by chance, by whim, by blind, stupid luck.''